Beware of Bad Boss

If youve never had a bad boss, count yourself lucky. Bosses who
lose their temper, play favorites or cant communicateand
thats just a start on the list of managerial misbehaviorcan make
going in to work annoying, humiliating and infuriating. And, unless
youre independently wealthy, youre probably not in a
position to tell your boss to take this job and shove it. What can you
do if you get a boss whos the biggest obstacle to doingand
enjoyingyour job?

Becoming aware that this is a problem is the first step,
says Christine Wilson, an independent career coach in New York City. If
you do get stuck with a lousy boss, youll need a strategy for
dealing with the things that your boss doesor doesnt
dothat drive you crazy.

But who are these bad bosses that might turn your life into a Dilbert
strip? There are a few common typesbut also a few common-sense
ways of handling them.

The Micro-Managing Boss

While some bosses expect too much (see the Unreasonable
Boss), it can also be a problem when bosses expect too little. That is, some
dont expect much independence or initiative because they
dont leave room for it. Instead of delegating, a micro-managing
boss gets involved in your work to the point of getting in your way.

Whether your boss is delegationally challengedor whether its
just that a lot is riding on your work and the boss wants to be sure you
can handle itJoyce Lain Kennedy, author of Resumes for Dummies
(3rd Edition) and a syndicated career columnist, says the solution is
the same.

Ask for a time when you can discuss the best ways to improve your
contribution, Kennedy says. Be deferential, not ready for a
fight.

She suggests saying something like, I think I can better support
your efforts if I clearly understand the outcome you expect, and I would
benefit from knowing more about your experience or preferred ways of
working. Then tell your boss that you will report back on a
regular basis to receive feedback on your progress, explaining:
The more you have reason to trust my performance, the more time
youll have to pursue other important matters.

If you approach it like this, the boss will get the drift,
Kennedy says. Each time you receive a new assignment, do a mental
checklist of desired outcomes, performance expected, land mines to
avoid, resources available and deadlines. Then obtain confirmation from
your boss that your understanding of the assignment agrees with how she
sees it. After going through this process a few times, Kennedy
says, trust will build and youll have fewer empowerment
issues to ruin your day.

Bettina Seidman, a career management coach in Manhattan who works with
individuals and groups, advises that micro-managing bosses can be a
particular problem in technology fields. This is work that
requires linear thinking, she says, and sometimes the people
who do it best are the detail-oriented people, not the big picture
people. Its a fundamental dilemma. Seidman offers some
additional advice for dealing with this type of boss.

If youre new to a company, its important to wait a
little bit and get a sense of the company culture, she says. What
you perceive as micro-management might simply be the way things work. It
might also be that your bossor the whole organizationis
particularly stressed, and that youll be trusted more when a
particular deadline has been met. It might even be that your boss is
forced to micro-manage you in order to satisfy the demands of a
micro-managing boss whos higher up the ladder.

Success requires a certain understanding of whats going on
around you, says Seidman, who suggests asking
aroundtactfullyto see if others perceive your boss the same
way you do. Youll get a better sense of whats going on
overall, and you might find some allies.

If everybodys feeling the same way, then maybe two people
can ask for a meeting with the manager and put together a discussion
plan in advance. One way to do it, Seidman suggests, is not to
talk about micro-management as such, but to provide examples of things
that have affected your ability to get your work done.

What you dont want to do is simply charge into your bosss
office one day and announce, Im having a problem with the
way we work together, says Seidman. How you present
yourself, and the timing, are critical.

The Ballistic Boss

Steve* knew his boss had a temperhe just didnt know how bad
it was until he ended up in the line of fire.

A project that my team was working on had a number of delays, and
one of them involved something that I was responsible for, he
says. The pressure was on, and we were all putting in long hours
to catch up. But in the middle of that, my boss called me into his
office, and with the door wide open, he started yelling about the delay,
about how much it was costing, and about how it was making him look bad.
Anyone in that whole corner of the building could easily hear.

It was so ridiculous. I was doing everything I could, and yet he
lost his temper and acted as if I was doing something to personally
offend him. And of course, he would rarely thank or congratulate us for
the things wed done well.

Dealing with a berserk boss is bad under any circumstances, but
its even worse when you havent done anything wrong. How
should you respond?

When your boss treats you like an amoeba, the very best response
in 99% of cases is not to react, says Joyce Lain Kennedy.
Acknowledge that you heard the diatribeI understand. Thank
you for the information.but dont allow your face to
get bent out of shape and dont mouth off. Go home and sleep on it.

No one does his best thinking on an adrenaline rush. Youll
have more power and better strategy the next day when the shock has worn
off. If nothing else, Kennedy says, if you do end up getting into
a shouting match even after trying to cool down, youll have
had time to think of better counter punches.

At times, however, you might not have the option of a temporary retreat.
If your boss calls you out on the mat in the middle of a meeting, for
example, you might need to respond right then and there.

When your boss is having a bad temper day and you must answer in
detail, keep your voice low and your delivery slow, Kennedy says.
Speaking in moderate tones makes you seem like the adult and the
belligerent boss like the child.

Looking more mature than your boss might impress your coworkers, but
that might not be enough if the problem continues. If your boss is doing
something thats unreasonable or unprofessional, Gerald Johnson,
the author of Bad Bosses, Bad Jobs, Fight Back!, advises talking to the
boss about it in private.

Go to your boss and say, If you need to talk to me about
something like this, can you do it in private? At the same time,
however, Johnson says its important to document your efforts to
get your boss to behave more professionally. Keep a record with a brief
description of what you said and when, and what your bosss
response was. If your boss repeatedly blows up at you even after
agreeing not to, a paper trail will come in handy if you have to take
your complaint to the next level: your bosss boss.

More than likely that boss will come in and will actually solve
the problem for you. They dont like to lose good people, because
it will cost them money to hire and train someone else, Johnson
says. If your boss already has a reputation for blowing up, the records
that youve kept can become a part of helping to do something about
it. If nothing else, showing that youve tried to solve the problem
yourself, before you took it to anyone else, makes it clear that
youre not just a complainer and can boost your credibility.

A variation on the ballistic boss is the boss who only goes ballistic
with certain people. Meanwhile, a pet of the boss might be
allowed to get away with more and expected to do less.

The fundamentals of being a good boss are respectful treatment and
a concern for fairness in the workplace, says Johnson. Not getting
that, he says, is one of the most common complaints that people have
about jobs, even more than pay. Its one of the things that
gets people most upset. Favoritism can happen at all levels,
Johnson says, and it really does hurt people.

Boss favoritism creates unfair and uncomfortable situations, but again
the way to deal with it involves documentation, says Johnson. Keep an
eye on company policies that your boss is violating or overlooking, and
be ready with specifics if you ever need to defend yourself or raise the
subject with someone higher up. If you sit back and do nothing
about it, Johnson says, a bosss favoritism toward another
employee can reflect badly on you.

Caras boss never lost her temper, but she had unrealistic
expectations.

No matter what I did, it was never enough for my first boss,
she said. She didnt realize how many things I had become
responsible for in the first year since Id been hired.

The Unreasonable Boss

A close relative of the boss who goes berserk is the boss who has
expectations that range from unreasonable to impossibleand this is
another case where documentation comes in handy.

Some bosses see the whole picture, but they dont see all the
details, says Johnson. You have to show them.

To deal with a boss whose expectations are unrealistic, Johnson advises
making a work study. That is, make a list of what you work on and for
how long, over a period of a few days that are representative of your
typical work load. Then you take your work study and say, Look,
Im concerned about not being able to get the job done. Maybe you
can help me.

The trick is in having the records to back up what youre saying.
Youve got to document your efforts to get relief,
Johnson says. Once you do that and make your boss aware of everything
that is coming across your desk, the ball is in his or her court. When
your boss has a better understanding of what youre contributing,
you might get yourself some relief, Johnson says, and you might even get
something more. You might get greater recognition, and Johnson even
knows of employees who have been given a raise after making it clear how
much they were doing.

In some cases your boss might expect too much of you and your coworkers
without meaning any harm, but Johnson cautions against a similar type of
boss that he calls the finger-pointer.

That boss doesnt say, What happened? They say,
Who did it? They typically look for someone to blame,
instead of concentrating on fixing the problem.

If youre a scapegoat for this type of boss, Johnson advises paying
particular attention to whatever performance reviews you might get. If
your boss is taking something out on you in a written evaluation,
Johnson advises against signing it. Ask for another performance
review. If you dont do that, it can become a part of your
record. Once again, the key to your credibilityand the
ability to make a case to others, if necessarywill likely be your
ability to document the contribution youre making.

The Inexperienced Boss

I thought my boss was actually afraid of me, said Mike, who
took a job with a software start-up company after graduating. He
seemed like a nice enough guy, and I never really noticed anything odd
during the job interviews. But after Id worked there awhile, I
realized that he never said much during meetings or in person. But then
he would send me these emails, sometimes yelling at me and other
people who worked under him for things that we never even knew about. It
was especially bad because things would kind of bottleneck around this
boss, and then all of a sudden everybody would get emails from him about
things that needed to be done yesterday.

Its surprising but true: some bosses dont know how to be
bosses. They might know their field well, but they dont know how
to work with and manage other peopleand it can be a particular
problem in technology fields.

Seidman says that this scenario is not unusual and suggests that many
people with introverted personalities tend to be drawn to
technology-related work in the first place. On top of that, they might
never have received training or practice managing people, especially if
their technical skills moved them up quickly in their company or
organization.

They came out of school, they were smart, they won awards, they
came into companies, they worked their tails off, they got promoted, and
their whole lives theyve always been recognized for their
abilities, for their skills, Seidman says. But all of a
sudden they have to be able to talk to people, to manage people and to
evaluate people. In some cases, they just dont know how to do
it.

Theyre not dumb, Seidman recognizes, but just
because youre good at one thing doesnt mean youre good
at another. In todays world, youve got to be an expert and
youve got to be a good manager.

Christine Wilson says that discovering your boss doesnt know how
to be one can be particularly confusing if it happens to you right out
of school, when you dont have a lot of on-the-job experience and
confidence yet yourself. As a new employee, you go in thinking
that your boss is supposed to know what to do, and they
dont. Wilson says she consulted once with a boss who felt
frustrated because his employees werent giving him reports on what
they had been working on each day. She asked if he had simply ever asked
them to do this, and he admitted, No, I never have.

In cases where your boss isnt doingor isnt able to
dosomething that seems obvious, Wilson says it might help to
accept your bosss style (or the lack thereof) and learn to work
around it.

Figure out how the boss ticks, she says. Ask the boss
periodically whether theres anything else you can be doing. In
this world of 24/7, its probably also useful to ask your boss what
kind of reporting they want from you. Bosses might not want you to
talk to them in person everyday but would appreciate a quick email
summary. On the other hand, they might only want to hear when
youve finished a major project, not in-between. Adapt as much as
you can to their style.

You cant usually change your bosss behavior. You can
only change yours to deal with whats there, says Wilson.

Other Advice

Bad bosses are out there, but some conflicts can be avoided before they
occur. Be careful, says Christine Wilson, of complaining too much
about your boss to people who seem sympathetic but may not be.

We live in a world where what wed like to do is blame the
boss, Wilson says, but going too far and seeming like a
malcontent can damage your career. Its also important
to keep in mind the possibility that your boss might not simply be
bad, but that you havent figured out how the two
of you click.

One way to prevent or minimize problems is to be absolutely clear about
what your bosss expectations are at the beginning, when
youre starting a new job or project. Im a great
believer that a person being given a task should take notes and make
sure to feedback to the boss what your understanding was.

That gives clarity and confidence that this is what happened at that
time.

When measures like taking notes, trying to adapt to your bosss
style and other methods arent enough though, it can be tempting to
head out the door.

But what if you cant leave or if its not a wise career move?

Its a large problem if you clash with your boss on your
first jobyou need that reference! says Joyce Lain Kennedy.
So do your best to grin and bear it until you can escape, then be
classy about it. Look as good going away as you did coming in.

You might also be learning a great deal despite that awful
boss, says Wilson, who adds that it might just be a matter of
hanging in there until you get everything that you can out of the job.
For example, says Wilson, you can just become tougher by noticing
that your boss yells at everybody, not just you.

Dot every i and cross every t while
youre looking for the next job, Wilson says. You
manage your boss by managing yourself.

Chris Ott is a free-lance writer and co-author of How to Get a
Job in Denver & Central Colorado (Surrey Books)